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As China's protest numbers grow, so does the hope Xi Jinping's hated lockdown rules could finally end

demonstrators - REUTERS
demonstrators - REUTERS

Something Zhang had not felt for years began to flutter in his heart when he saw protesters gather near his apartment on Shanghai’s Urumqi street on Sunday. It was hope.

“I lost hope for this land a few years ago and gave up the idea of fighting,” he said, after refusing to give his full name for fear of arrest. But an “inextricable impulse” drove him to join hundreds on the streets of China’s largest city as protests against draconian lockdown restrictions swept the nation.

“I thought it would be good to participate, even just stand there,” Zhang told the Telegraph. On Urumqi street, he stood silently with his neighbours in a morning vigil designed to challenge the authorities without provoking them too far.

Many protesters held up blank sheets of paper or fixed them to telephone poles - a symbolic jab at the suppression of dissent taken up across the nation.

Protesters - AFP
Protesters - AFP

The protests on Urumqi street began on Saturday night, Zhang said, when a local bookshop organised a march in commemoration of the victims of an apartment fire.

Ten people died in the fire in the city of Urumqi, in the western Xinjiang province, with locals claiming families were barricaded inside their homes because of an ongoing three-month lockdown. Social media posts from the overnight march show residents shouting “down with Xi Jinping! Down with the Communist Party” - an extraordinary show of defiance.

By Sunday afternoon, protesters in Shanghai had started to chant once more and police quickly lost patience, bundling dozens into vans. “Whoever stood stood still on the street would be targeted,” Zhang said.

One man holding a bunch of yellow flowers was shoved into a police car at a busy intersection, according to several pieces of video footage.

Zhang was not the only Shanghai citizen taking part in their first ever public protest. Another demonstrator from the Xinjiang region told the Associated Press he was inspired to join by the bravery of fellow citizens “Everyone thinks that Chinese people are afraid to come out and protest, that they don't have any courage” he said.

“Actually in my heart, I also thought this way. But then when I went there, I found that the environment was such that everyone was very brave.”

From city to city, the mood was one of stirring courage, with protesters voicing aloud their frustration with the erosion of civil liberties under the decade-long rule of Xi Jinping - a campaign that stretches back further than Covid restrictions.

“Give movies back, we want cinema freedom. We want free expression. Give media back, give us journalism back,” one young woman was filmed shouting in Beijing’s Liang Ha Me neighbourhood.

In Wuhan, the city where coronavirus first emerged, citizens filmed themselves breaking the restrictions that have been a feature of their lives for longer than any other people in the world.

One video showed residents milling around bright yellow barricades knocked on to the floor, ignoring the calls of a discarded megaphone to show their "health code".

Mr Xi, who effectively installed himself as ruler for life at the Communist Party Congress in October, is now faced with the challenge of how to respond to the biggest challenge to Communist rule for decades.

With protesters demonstrating at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua university - Mr Xi’s alma mater - comparisons have been drawn with the Tiananmen Square movement of 1989. On Sunday police were forced to block a group of around 300 protesters from converging on the square itself, in what would have been an unheard-of show of defiance.

vigil - Ng Han Guan/AP
vigil - Ng Han Guan/AP

The government’s success in brutally putting down Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement by jailing hundreds for lengthy sentences is not something that can be easily replicated on the mainland, analysts say.

Nevertheless, fears were growing on Sunday for those who had joined the marchers. “It’s painful to watch, knowing what is going to happen to those who chanted [anti-regime slogans],” said Yaqui Wang, senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch.

In London, dozens of people called for Xi Jinping to step down and the relaxation of Covid lockdowns in a protest outside the Chinese embassy - adding their voices to the movement without the attendant fear of summary imprisonment.

The regime, many analysts believe, is unlikely to relent on its flagship zero-Covid policy. An editorial in Sunday's state-run People Daily explicitly links the strategy to the strength of the Communist party.

“Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core, China adheres to the supremacy of the people and life, and adheres to external prevention of importation and internal prevention of a [Covid] rebound,” it read.

For the past few days, China’s case numbers have hit record highs, with nearly 40,000 new infections on Saturday prompting yet more lockdowns in cities across the country. On Sunday, Shenzhen city announced it would limit indoor venue and restaurant capacity to 50 per cent.

It is not mere ideology that weighs against a relaxation of Covid restrictions. As Prof Francis Balloux of University College London said on Sunday, the country is “extremely poorly prepared” for a major Covid surge, with low levels of vaccination in the elderly and low levels of general immunity.

If Mr Xi was to bow to popular demands for greater freedom, China’s healthcare system could “easily be overwhelmed," he wrote on Twitter.

For now, the authorities appear to have treated protesters with a comparatively soft touch - allowing hundreds of demonstrators to chant deep into the night on Beijing’s third ring road, for example.

They will have to hope such dissent amounts to no more than a brief flare of fury- and not the steady flame of revolution.

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